Physical attacks against digital targets

Anyone who has seen me present or has been a student in my class is familiar with the matrix below. In fact, this matrix was the guiding principle for an entire conference session in Sweden 18 months ago and I’ve briefed on it least 300 times to thousands of people.

Now read this article:

SCOTLAND YARD has uncovered evidence that Al-Qaeda has been plotting to bring down the internet in Britain, causing chaos to business and the London Stock Exchange. Link —>

This is the beginning of what will be an interesting trend as some emergent terrorist cells push the boundaries and decide to engage in physical attacks on financial infrastructures. When you are in Nigeria all your targets look like oil pipelines, so when you are in London, what do you targets look like if your intention is to wage economic terrorism?

Richard Clarke even has a recent book where the founding premise is a series of attacks on the U.S. Internet infrastructure. It isn’t a bad read, even with the obvious Soxster = Mudge parallels.